Transit of Venus!!

oh my gosh, wow!! Isn't this cool? Below is a photo of the planet Venus beginning its transit across the sun...

(and no, we didn't take this photograph; I borrowed it from Reuters/NASA). Our efforts weren't quite so successful.

I tried the 'pinhole-in-a-piece-of-paper' method, which failed miserably. Tom found out that we could use the binoculars to focus the light onto a surface, which did work. (it was very bright, though, which is why the contrast in these photos is just ridiculous. I did what I could with them.)

He held the binoculars as steady as possible, and focused them as much as possible-- it was really cool! We could actually see Venus, and Tom, with his super-sharp vision, could actually see three or four sunspots, as well. Over the course of the couple hours we could see it, I took well over 80 photographs. It was frustrating, because we could see Venus by looking at it, but I couldn't figure out how to set the camera to actually capture the image. In those 80+ photos, I actually (amazingly, and I don't know how I did it) got a couple photos that actually worked!

Here's one that I did a lot of processing on; cropped it really close, and I think changed it to 'heat map' to cut down (some) on the contrast. The large green disk is the sun, and the light green dot, there, is actually Venus!!

Here's the clearest photo I got... Venus is clearly visible in this one!! It was hot (and sunny) outside, and most of the photos didn't work, but it was definitely worth all the effort to see this!


(PS: I didn't have time to do any art journaling, what with trying to see Venus and all, but I'll be back with some more journal pages soon.)